Attempts at Restitution

Ferdinand had no children and left his entire estate to Maria and her older brother Robert and sister Luise. Luise was stranded in Yugoslavia, where she had survived the war with two young children.  Her husband was arrested by the communists and executed for being a ”capitalist.”  Maria’s brother Robert, who had fled to Vancouver, Canada, with his two other brothers, took up the task of attempting to retrieve Ferdinand’s property.

After the war, a family friend and lawyer in Vienna, Gustav Rinesch, attempted to recover the Klimt paintings and other artworks and property.  The Allies had collected looted artworks and held them in the Art Collecting Point in Munich. However, individual applicants were not permitted to retrieve their property directly.  Rather, the artworks would only be returned to their country of origin, which was then responsible for determining whether the artworks should be restituted. Austria used this procedure and laws against exporting cultural items to obtain and hold Nazi-looted artworks hostage. The Austrian Federal Monument Office routinely demanded donations to federal museums before it would permit any artworks to be returned and exported to their former owners, most of whom remained outside Austria.

One of the Klimt landscapes was retrieved by Rinesch from Führer, who was imprisoned for Nazi activities.  It was kept in an apartment in Vienna pending a request for export permits.  The City of Vienna agreed in 1947 to return another landscape painting to Ferdinand's heirs, but demanded a return of the purchase price.  But the Austrian Gallery refused to return the three paintings it had taken from Ferdinand's collection during the war, claiming instead that the paintings had been given to the Austrian Gallery in 1925 by Ferdinand's wife, Adele. This claim was inconsistent with Adele Bloch-Bauer's will of 1923, which makes only the legally unenforceable request that her husband donate the paintings after his death. The heirs and their attorney, however, did not have access to Adele’s will or other court documents, which were taken out of the court files by the Austrian Gallery.

The Director of the Austrian Gallery, Karl Garzarolli, realized the invalidity of his museum’s claim to the Klimt paintings, as he very revealingly confided to his Nazi-era predecessor, Bruno Grimschitz, on March 8, 1948:

Because there is no mention of these facts [the purported donation of the Klimt paintings by Adele or Ferdinand] in the available files of the Austrian Gallery, i.e. neither a court-authorized nor a notarized or other personal declaration of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer exists, which in my opinion you certainly should have obtained, I find myself in an extremely difficult situation. . . . I cannot understand why even during the Nazi era an incontestable declaration of gift in favor of the state was never obtained from Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. . . .

In any case, the situation is growing into a sea-snake . . . I am very concerned that up until now all of the cases of restitution have brought with them immense confusion.  In my opinion it would be also in your interest to stick by me while this is sorted out. Perhaps that way we will best come out of this not exactly danger-free situation.